The Bulgarian Grid Consortium is now fully operational

Bulgaria joined the list of countries fully operational NGIs, as announced in a broadcast to the EGI community on 18 January.

The Bulgarian Grid Consortium manages ten sites, including two large HPC clusters and provides computing resources for more than 100 users. The NGI, previously part of the South-East Europe Regional Operations Centre, was set up a consortium of academic institutions led by the Institute for Parallel Processing of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The Bulgarian NGI team spent the last two years adding new hardware while moving to a new operational model, adds Durchova, and a few problems related to new hardware deployment were inevitable.

The Nagios monitoring system was the last tool to become operational. Following the successful migration of all systems, the Bulgarian Grid Consortium was the first NGI to become fully operational in 2011.

The Bulgarian NGI team has many plans for the future: “We are currently planning expansion of our current infrastructure in terms of storage mainly and we are also considering the addition of a new Grid site,” says Durchova.